Saturday, 21 May 2011

So still busy working away on my Child Sleep Safe Imagine Cup entry, this time I have been working on a .Net Micro Framework demonstrator application to show off Serial X10 communication messages.

I am using my Widgets library that I wrote years ago for my OPO runtime on the Micro Framework, that near worked correctly but this does. I am using the widgets for the X10 Configuration screens, a menu system and the about dialog box (as shown)

In other news the PC software is moving along, now with the charting tools being operational

Microsoft has released a Blog post on the main Imagine Cup website about the UK finals where you can see a lovely picture of me and also a comment that I don't believe I ever said (in those particular words) ...creative journalism :)

Well to mark my trip to New York for the Imagine Cup in July, I went out and got myself a shiny new Nikon d3100 DSLR so I have chance to take some great pictures while there. Beats the 3mp old wreak of a camera I took with me to Warsaw.

So a little more about my project. I've been working on the networking code lately. The implementation I am using is based on Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) This handles the underlying message formatting, synchronisation and transmission so I need only worry about the messages themselves.

The messages that MSMQ pass between the Embedded device and the PC are a serialization of a class containing a variety of fields useful to Child Sleep Safe. As MSMQ has a limit of 4mb per message which should be more than enough really but just to be safe I implemented compression on the message body using System.IO.Compression and to add additional security there is also Encryption using System.Security. These two properties can be user configured so once a message has been received, and is de-serialized to a class these properties are checked and the required actions are performed.

The code I am basing my networking stack on is the MSMQ example as part of the Windows Mobile SDK (Library Book Example App) which is also available for download on MSDN, though my implementation is heavily modified to allow much easier two way communications.

Sorry to all those looking for code samples but I don't want to release anything till after the Imagine Cup finals.

About Me

I'm currently employed as a Software Engineer specializing in Embedded Solutions after finishing my Software Engineering degree at York. I was an Academic Developer Evanglist at Microsoft and a world-wide finalist in the Imagine Cup developer competition in both 2010 and 2011.